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‘Z’: A Response

A letter from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

If Jeff Himmelman thinks his discovery of a December 4, 1972 memo on Watergate is a significant revelation, he is wrong. The memo he has is authentic. To the best of our recollection, someone contacted Carl and said there was a person, a neighbor, who had important information on Watergate. Carl went and interviewed the woman as described in the Dec. 4, 1972 memo. As the memo plainly shows, Carl did not know she was a member of the Watergate grand jury when he arrived at her home.

She gave Carl her phone number—and he later noted "this checked w. grand jury list number" that we
had. If he knew initially that he was interviewing a member of the grand jury, that would have been
stated at the top of the memo, as was our style in all Watergate memos of interviews. He also quotes
her in the memo as volunteering, "of course I was on the grand jury" because that was news to him.

Though the woman threw out lots of names of those she suspected of furthering the criminal
conspiracy (she had some right and some wrong), she provided no specific information of suspect
or illegal actions. What she said led to no story. As Carl wrote in the memo, "she advises us to read
our articles from Sept. 15 to Oct. 30. "You will have many clues—there is more truth there than you
must have realized. " We wrote those stories and did realize they were true. Those stories essentially
outlined the Watergate conspiracy and alleged that crimes had been committed by Haldeman, Mitchell,
Stans, Kalmbach, Magruder, Porter, Chapin and Segretti.

We referred to this woman's interview in less than two pages (p. 211-213) in our book about covering
Watergate, All the President's Men. In that book we did not, or course, reveal that she was a member of
the grand jury—in order to protect her as a source .

When asked on April 26 2012 by Himmelman, neither of us—until after reading the original memo
after 39 years—remembered she had been a member of the Watergate grand jury. The interview
with her had been of little consequence because she was not telling us much more than we already
believed—and published. And the lack of specifics in her account meant we had little to follow up on.
Frankly we were not sure what to make of her comments at the time, and in our book Carl noted that
she "sounded like some kind of mystic." But it was one of those interviews that gave us and our editors
comfort that we were on the right track as later demonstrated by the subsequent investigations and
history. The memo does, however, show that a member of the grand jury thought the prosecutors, who
supervised and ran the grand jury, had missed the real story and the high-level conspiracy.

You ought to publish the whole memo so your readers can see it and understand its clear context.